Ep 101 | Trump’s Plan to Free American Farmers from the Food Cartel | Joel Salatin

Summary

Zero Hour with James Poulos Episode 101: Trump’s Plan to Free American Farmers from the Food Cartel | Featuring Joel Salatin Release Date: June 8, 2025

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Introduction to Joel Salatin

In Episode 101 of Zero Hour, host James Poulos welcomes Joel Salatin—a multi-generational farmer known for his unique blend of Christian beliefs, libertarian principles, environmentalism, capitalism, and his often colorful description of himself as a "lunatic farmer." Joel introduces himself as a farmer deeply entrenched in innovative agricultural practices aimed at revolutionizing the American food system.

Notable Quote:

“You probably think of a straw hat and tractor when you think of farming, but this guy's changing everything about how it works.”
— James Polis [00:16]

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The State of Modern Agriculture

Joel Salatin traces the roots of contemporary agricultural issues back to his family's farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, established in 1961. He highlights severe soil erosion, exemplified by a 16-foot-deep gully formed by three to eight feet of topsoil loss over 200 years of European farming practices. Joel criticizes the Eurocentric focus on grain production, fertility reliance on imported substances, and the exploitation of cheap labor, including slavery.

Notable Quotes:

“Grain was the Holy Grail.”
— Joel Salatin [02:41]

“One in five mouthfuls of food that Americans take are imported from foreign countries. And so we need to feed ourselves first.”
— Joel Salatin [06:32]

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Critique of Industrial Farming and Government Policies

Joel offers a scathing critique of industrial farming, emphasizing the detrimental impact of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and antibiotics. He argues that these practices disrupt natural ecological cycles, leading to stronger pests and superbugs like MRSA and C. diff. Joel uses the example of the bird flu outbreak, where 166 million chickens were culled despite only a fraction being sick, citing this as an “extermination policy” that prevents chickens from developing natural immunity.

Notable Quotes:

“This extermination policy is insanity, both scientifically and intuitively.”
— Joel Salatin [10:17]

“Safety is subjective.”
— Joel Salatin [29:46]

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The Food Emancipation Proclamation

Central to Joel’s vision is the Food Emancipation Proclamation, a proposal to dismantle the monopolistic grip of major food corporations like Tyson on the American food system. He envisions a decentralized agricultural sector where small-scale farmers can engage in neighbor-to-neighbor food transactions without heavy regulatory burdens. Joel argues that such decentralization would enhance food resilience, lower costs, and reinvigorate rural economies.

Notable Quotes:

“We have an enslaved, shackled food system that is enslaved to a regulatory, a bureaucratic structure.”
— Joel Salatin [26:16]

“If we had a food emancipation proclamation to unshackle our food system and to free up small scale entrepreneurs to access their neighbors, I don't know how big it is, but the local price would drop, the access would go through the roof.”
— Joel Salatin [39:31]

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Government Intervention and Market Monopolies

Joel is highly critical of government interventions in agriculture, referring to subsidies and regulations that favor large agribusinesses over small farmers. He points out that Iowa alone receives over $1 billion annually in crop subsidies, which have contributed to a monoculture system detrimental to competition and sustainability. Joel contends that free markets, unhindered by government favoritism, would naturally encourage a diverse and resilient agricultural landscape.

Notable Quotes:

“They keep picking the winners and losers.”
— Joel Salatin [23:19]

“There is no monopoly in any civilization. There's never a monopoly without government collusion.”
— Joel Salatin [36:14]

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Transparency and Ethical Farming Practices

Joel emphasizes transparency in farming operations as a remedy to consumer distrust. His farm adopts an Open Door Policy, allowing anyone to visit anytime without prior arrangement, contrasting sharply with the secretive and restrictive practices of large corporations. He believes that ethical farming nurtures trust and ensures the health and safety of both consumers and the environment.

Notable Quotes:

“Our farm has an Open Door Policy 24, 7, 365.”
— Joel Salatin [46:58]

“We are responsible for them. We don't want them to get foodborne bacterial diarrhea.”
— Joel Salatin [55:04]

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The Role of Christian Stewardship

Joel integrates his Christian faith into his farming philosophy, viewing himself as a steward of God's creation. He believes that ethical treatment of the land and animals is a divine mandate, fostering a sense of responsibility and purpose that transcends mere profitability.

Notable Quotes:

“In my Christian theology, that owner is God. And so if it's his stuff, then I ultimately, I'm a steward.”
— Joel Salatin [52:56]

“Our patrons are our patron saints.”
— Joel Salatin [55:04]

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Advice for Americans Facing Agricultural Crisis

Joel offers three actionable steps for listeners concerned about the current food system's trajectory:

1. Get in Your Kitchen: Encourage cooking from scratch using single ingredients facilitated by modern kitchen gadgets.
2. Do Something Yourself: Engage in activities like growing sprouts or composting to connect with the food production process.
3. Put Attention on Provenance: Support local farmers and secure the knowledge of where and how your food is produced.

Notable Quotes:

“Get single ingredient stuff. It's never been easier to cook from scratch.”
— Joel Salatin [55:35]

“Put some attention on finding your providence.”
— Joel Salatin [57:50]

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Conclusion: Emancipating the Food System

The episode concludes with Joel Salatin reinforcing the need for systemic change through the Food Emancipation Proclamation. He passionately advocates for freeing American farmers from corporate control, promoting ecological stewardship, and fostering a community-oriented food economy.

Notable Quotes:

“Let's emancipate the food. Let's emancipate the farmers. Let's go.”
— Joel Salatin [58:13]

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Final Thoughts

Joel Salatin’s insights in this episode of Zero Hour present a compelling case for transforming the American food system by decentralizing agriculture, empowering small farmers, and reinstating ethical stewardship rooted in both ecological and Christian values. His vision challenges listeners to consider the profound impacts of current agricultural practices and to take actionable steps toward a more sustainable and equitable food future.

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Key Themes:

• Sustainability: Emphasis on perennial systems, soil fertility, and ecological balance.
• Decentralization: Advocating for small-scale, community-based farming over large agribusiness monopolies.
• Transparency: Promoting open operations to build consumer trust and accountability.
• Ethics and Stewardship: Integrating Christian values into agricultural practices.
• Market Freedom: Criticizing government subsidies and regulations that hinder market diversity and resilience.

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Recommended For: Listeners interested in sustainable agriculture, food sovereignty, libertarian economic principles, and ethical farming practices will find Joel Salatin’s perspectives both challenging and inspiring.

Transcript

[James Polis]

Anyone can follow. It takes something special to be an original, which is why the 2025 Lincoln Navigator SUV arrives with new ways of surrounding you in luxury, including the ultra wide 48 inch panoramic display and the multi sensory Lincoln Rejuvenate experience. A true original never stops evolving. So meet the 2025 Navigator, the original that's all new and better than ever. Learn [e-mail] link in the Navigator at trademarks afford or its affiliates. You probably think of a straw hat and tractor when you think of farming, but this guy's changing everything about how it works. Joel Salatin joins us in studio today. I'm James Polis. This is Zero Hour. He's a self described Christian, libertarian, environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer. And he's here in studio today. Welcome, Joel.

[Joel Salatin]

It's great to be here. Thank you.

[James Polis]

All right. So we're going to unpack that, but I just want to start, you know, lay the groundwork here. You are a multi generational farmer, which I think is really important to kind of understanding where you're coming from, what you're doing, what your diagnosis is of kind of what moment we're in, what the stakes are. You were raised on the farm, you grew up on the farm, you took over the farm. You've been running the farm for quite some time now.

[Joel Salatin]

Yes.

[James Polis]

And you've seen crazy change unfold not just sort of in the immediate vicinity in Virginia, but of course, throughout the country. Some might say that things have been building to a crisis point for some time. And finally we have an election where a popular figure rides into power. I'm talking about RFK here. You he's not the president, but this is a guy with a lineage who stands up and says, you know, number one issue is make America healthy again. And if we don't do it now, it's not going to get done at catastrophic consequences. That seems to track with the way that more and more Americans are feeling what they're experiencing in their everyday lives. Concerns about, you know, you sort of look around and do sort of man on the street sort of check on the people you see walking around. And you don't always like what you see. You know, things seem to be headed toward that kind of crisis point. I'm interested in kind of starting out with, you know, what is lifelong experience to date taught you and shown you about kind of what the problem is, how bad it is and how farming might lead us out of the woods here.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah. So our, our family came to the farm where we are in Virginia, Shenandoah Valley in 1961. And it was a great indicator of everything that was wrong in agriculture, even up until then. You know, we had. We had. Our deepest gully was 16ft deep. A gully is something where the topsoil has eroded and you have this deep V in the countryside. So that's bad, that's bad, that's bad. Depending on where you go, three to eight feet of topsoil had washed off of our land in the 200 years of European occupation, post indigenous use, which was primarily a, you know, it was a prairie, you know, wild game, you know, bison, elk, of course, a lot of passenger pigeons, pheasants, different things. But it was a perennially based system. Perennially, as opposed to annual, which you have to plant all the time. And when the Europeans came, of course, you know, they. Grain was the Holy Grail. How can we grow grain? And, you know, I've often thought, you know, if Thomas Jefferson were alive, would he have had a Tyson Chicken house? And the answer is yes, because his four goals were identical to industrial. Industrial farming today. Number one, grain is the Holy Grail. Number two, fertility comes from somewhere else. You couldn't actually grow soil or keep soil fertile in situ. You had to import, or you had to go west, young man, go west. You had to find new ground. And then, of course, another aspect was cheap labor, and then another one was exports. Cheap labor, of course, being slavery at that time. And then exports. The answer to economics is exports. And my paradigm, our family's paradigm, is completely opposite all that we want to pay our labor. We like white collar, salaried farmers. We think that's a good thing. Let's get our best and brightest on the land, not our D and F students. We believe that domestic. Supplying our domestic markets is the key to health. Right now, one in five mouthfuls of food that Americans take are imported from foreign countries. And so we need to feed ourselves first. We believe in fertility comes from in situ. You know, nature. Nature doesn't move carbon very far. I mean, you know, leaves blow and, you know, birds eat something and then go up and poop somewhere. But it doesn't move carbon real far. You know, the idea that American farmers are locked into Moroccan phosphate and Vladimir Putin's anhydrous ammonia, that's not a natural system. And so in all of these respects, and as far as grain, grain is not the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is perennials and livestock.

[James Polis]

All.

[Joel Salatin]

Diets of antiquity were founded in herbivores and seafood. Herbivores being cows, camels, sheep, goats and seafood. Why? Well, because those were the nutrient dense things that could be grown without tillage. So until very modern times with cheap energy and mechanization, tillage was laborious. It was hard. If you had to walk with a sharp stick behind an ox all day, you couldn't turn very much soil to plant corn or amaranth or wheat. And so grain was always very, very expensive. Bread was a treat. It was a treat. And so when our family came to the farm, we had this gullied rock pile. We said, well, how do we heal this? How do we do this? And we started looking at these natural patterns of animal movement. Perennials on site, carbon biomass, vegetation on site, building soil on site and selling to your neighbors, selling to your neighborhood. You know, those were linchpins of our, you know, of kind of our paradigm going forward. And dad was an accountant, mom was a school teacher, the off farm jobs, paid the mortgage initially, you know, 10 years to do that. And. But dad was very much a visionary and way ahead of his time. We said he was, he was organic before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. And he is an accountant. He saw the chemical approach as a rat race. You were trying to stay ahead of nature's adaptation to adapt to the chemicals, whether it's fertilizers, pesticides, whatever. When you dump these unnaturals into nature, the biology of nature tries to adapt, counteract it. So the bugs get stronger. Then you have superbugs, mrsa, C diff, what we've seen with antibiotics and everything else. All of life is adapting, trying to adapt to new attacks that are coming, mutations and trying to survive. And so we could talk about that in regard to bird flu right now. Here we are in this big bird flu thing. 166 million chickens killed in the last 24 months, and probably only 1 or 2 million were actually sick. All the rest of them were fine. But we have this eradication idea that if 1 in 100,000 is sick, we kill all.

[James Polis]

Yeah, sterilize the world.

[Joel Salatin]

We sterilize everything. And what we do then is we deny chickens the chance to adapt to the virus. Let's not have a debate about whether or not there are viruses. Let's just let that one lie. And so the virus is trying to adapt, to become more virulent, more deadly, if you will. And so the chickens that either don't get it or got it and got over it, and there are many that do, to kill them, we deny chickens the chance for the most vibrant, virulent, immunological ones to adapt to give us progeny that is now keeping up with the virus.

[James Polis]

Yeah. If your immune system never gets a chance to work, then it's not an immune system.

[Joel Salatin]

That's right. That's right. It doesn't get a chance to adapt to whatever the new context is. And so this whole. This extermination policy is. It's insanity. It's just insanity, both scientifically and intuitively. When you have a disease, you don't kill the survivors. You keep the survivors. You breed.

[James Polis]

Let's kill more than the disease will.

[Joel Salatin]

Sure, sure, why not? And so our family set about looking at these basic natural patterns. Perennials, polycultures, animals move, neighborhood community marketing, on site, biomass generation. And so we started composting. Dad developed a portable electric fencing system so we could move the cows around. So we move. Instead of having animals confined in a factory house, whether it's cows, pigs, or chickens, or turkeys, ours are on pasture. And we move them every day to a new paddock with portable infrastructure. So the things that we have developed on our farm, we didn't sit around in a focus group and say, hmm, how can we be clever? No, they came as a natural result of looking at the way God made the system and saying, how do we duplicate that on a domestic scale? Nature doesn't put 100,000 cows in one spot. Nature doesn't put, you know, a bunch of chickens, close out the sun, close out the grass, and close out the decent air and coop them up in a house on their own toilet. Nature doesn't do that. And so, well, and, you know, at.

[James Polis]

That point, what are you really eating? What does that thing become?

[Joel Salatin]

Well, that's exactly right. I mean, when fecal particulate is what's in the air and you're breathing in that, and then that abrades your mucous membranes, your respiratory tract, and then makes big abscesses, you know, sores in your respiratory tract, and then the manure goes directly into your bloodstream. Well, now we got to pump them full of antibiotics and MRNA jabs and whatever to try to keep them healthy, create crutches. How much of that comes to us? What's the deal with that? And we know that nutritionally there's a huge difference. I mean, like, we participated with 11 others. There were 12 of us that participated in a wonderful egg study, oh, eight, nine years ago. And to try to settle the question, is there a difference in how an animal, how food is, how an animal is raised? And so, you know, we looked at about 10 different things that are on the, you know the USDA label on eggs, nutrition label, and I'll just take one of them. Folic acid. You know, our eggs averaged about 1038 micrograms per egg. And the official USDA label is 48. I mean, this isn't a 10% difference. This is night and day. Same thing. Omega 3, omega 6. Same thing with riboflavin in, like, grass finished beef. 300% more than grain finished beef in riboflavin. Those kinds of numbers are all over. And so, yeah, we say, you are what you eat. We are what you eat, but you also are what you eat, eats it, goes farther into it. So the mobility and the things that we've developed were a direct result of trying to mimic the abundance. A lot of people don't realize that 500 years ago, North America produced more food than it does today.

[James Polis]

Yeah, that's crazy.

[Joel Salatin]

That should give everybody pause. Now, it wasn't all eaten by people. You know, there were a couple hundred million bison, there were 2 million wolves, wanted 220 pounds of meat a day. I mean, when Lewis and Clark went on their expedition, you know, they said they couldn't go a mile without encountering a bear. Think about how much food, how many bears that must have been, you know, to feed. There were bird, bird populations that were so dense they blocked out the sun for a day. You know, passenger pigeons, which are now extinct. Beavers. There were 200 million beavers that ate. I mean, just 200 million beavers ate as much vegetation as all the people in North America today. So, you know, this was an incredibly abundant place. And so for all the, you know, machinations of John Deere tractors and hybrid seeds and Norman Borlaug and everything else that's come along, we still have not achieved the level of production that was here 500 years ago.

[James Polis]

Right. And at what cost? At biodiversity, tanking human health, tanking mental health, you know, it's all interrelated. And so if you're consuming things that are not good for you and not wholesome, it's going to have an effect on what's going on internally, mentally. And all these, these things. And they're all starting to line up and reach this crisis point. So.

[Joel Salatin]

And if that's not, if that's not bad enough, I mean, if just the reduction in nutritional vitality of our, of our raw food is not enough, now 75% of the food we eat is ultra processed, which then further apes it, adulterates it, you know, which means you can't make this stuff in your kitchen. And you can't pronounce the ingredients.

[James Polis]

Yeah. And so you go out to E for every meal and who knows what's in there. And then you need supplements and who knows what's in the supplements.

[Joel Salatin]

Right. I can well remember. I well remember I'm a little older than you are, but I well remember a day when you wanted to have a, you know, when mom wanted to have a birthday party for a three year old and you just invited your friends and you had a birthday party. Now you have to spend a week with all the other moms. Well, what's your kid allergic to? What's your, I mean, we didn't even have a phrase. Food allergies, it didn't even exist. Or celiac disease or gluten intolerance or any of these things. They weren't even in existence back then. And I didn't know any diabetics. I mean, there were almost no fat people. I mean, yeah, you knew the one fat lady, the one big fat guy, but it wasn't around.

[James Polis]

You had to make a real effort to gain weight like that. And now you just kind of go through whatever's laid out for you and these things start happening.

[Joel Salatin]

Right, Right. So the idea that we now just use this phraseology, E. Coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, all these things, I mean, in my view, what all of these are is essentially nature on her knees, if you will, begging us enough, you know, quit raping me, quit violating me, quit abusing me.

[James Polis]

How hard to punch back before you get a message.

[Joel Salatin]

So, you know, we dare to ask our farm, we dare to ask, well, how do we make happy pigs? We don't ask that in our culture. It's just we view the pig as an inanimate pile of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated, however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate it. And we don't ask how to respect and honor the pigness of the pig as a beginning of not only its health, but, but then, you know, our health. And then I would suggest that a culture that doesn't ask how to respect and honor the pig ness of the pig will also not ask how to honor and respect, you know, the James ness of James, the merriness of Mary. You know, it's how, it's how you, that's how you create an ethical, moral.

[James Polis]

Framework around when you got people on one end who say, no, the pig is just a blob of cells, just like everything is. You can totally abstract it out of its natural character, make it a platform, growing organs or spare parts, whatever you want. And then on the other side, you have people saying, no, no, no, a pig is a person, it's cuter than you, it's smarter than your toddler, we're worse than the pigs. Don't kill the pigs, don't eat the pigs. And you have this enormous gulf. And in a perverse way, like those two extremes actually seem to be reinforcing each other, pushing people further in those two directions, where you're either thinking of, of animals as just raw materials or as, you know, something that's too cute to even involve yourself in. And that bleeds into the way that we see one another too.

[Joel Salatin]

Well, it sure does. I mean, the both extremes, one views life as fundamentally mechanical, that it's just machines and mechanics. And the other views life in a perverse, almost an animalistic, cultish approach that my dog is my aunt is, my cat is, my pig is my chicken. And that does not indicate a new cosmic awareness of life and ethics. It's actually a devolution into a disconnection from our ecological umbilical. The fact is, in order to have life, something has to die. One of the best examples of that is a compost pile. I mean, a compost pile is all about something that was living, died. Now it's being decomposed and it's being regenerated. This life, death, decomposition, regeneration, life death, that is the cycle. If you don't believe that everything is eating and being eaten, that's how things work. And that's a fundamental ecological principle. If you don't believe that, go lie naked in your flower bed for a week and see what gets eaten. Some point it's going to get eaten. And so the people that have the worship, the animal worship element, which I understand is partly a backlash against concentrated animal feeding operations and the mechanistic view of the others.

[James Polis]

But both of those extremes are anti human.

[Joel Salatin]

They are both very anti human. They absolutely are.

[James Polis]

Okay, so these are the stakes. We got rfk, we got Maha out there. In times of crisis like this, people reach for the top down solution immediately. Oh my God, we can't, we have no time to lose. We can't wait for all these little farmers to do their little things. And we can't wait for nature to heal. We have to come in and fix it with just as much applied force as we messed it up. How do you, how do you respond to that sort of, that instinct, that feeling as someone who is doing it from the ground up?

[Joel Salatin]

So as a libertarian, I view pretty skeptically Any government intervention in the marketplace and you're hard pressed actually to find a government program that doesn't have some sort of perverse incentive in it. I was just in Iowa and Iowa gets well over $1 billion a year. Just Iowa, just one state in crop subsidies and of course three of them. Iowa doesn't growth sugar cane, cotton and rice. Iowa doesn't grow. So it's limited to corn, beans and wheat. And nobody else gets an incentive, nobody else gets a crop insurance, nobody else gets help. And so what it creates is a very monocultured system that is scale prejudicial against small and medium sized. And so just a handful of farms get the bulk of that, just like three entities have gotten the bulk of all the bird flu indemnity payments. All of these, these government interventionist programs are prejudicial against, against competition. They are protective of the biggest players that are in already.

[James Polis]

And so, and it pushes into other industries. You got corner the gasoline and where does it stop?

[Joel Salatin]

Sure, that's right, that's right. None of that would happen. I mean it's the same as solar panels. And none of that would happen if it weren't for the taxpayer subsidized finger on the scale of whatever the other side of that is. And so I think, and I'm not opposed to corn, I'm not opposed to solar panels, okay, but let them carry their weight, you know, when the time is right for them to happen. I mean Adam Smith's, you know, the invisible hand of the marketplace. When that works, then it works. And when it doesn't, when the government's putting their finger on the scale to pick the winners and losers, that's where you get this perversity. The reason we have a K Street where all the lobbyists live, the reason we have a K Street is because all of our markets and freedoms are for sale. If our freedoms weren't for sale and our decisions weren't for sale, we wouldn't have a K Street. And so, you know, my biggest concern, and I love the MAHA movement, I appreciate RFK Jr. We have talked. My biggest concern though is that we trade, we trade concessions for, you know, whatever Monsanto and dupont and chemicals, and we trade that for incentives on the other side. So that the, let's just say the organic community, which has accused the chemical community of bellying up to the trough for 60 years to get concessions, now suddenly organic community now, oh, we've got a chance. We'll belly up to the trough and we'll get this. No, no, neither One of them is correct. Don't anybody belly up to the trough. Let the government just stay out of the discussion and, and let the individual people make their decision.

[James Polis]

Have you talked to RFK about this issue?

[Joel Salatin]

Yes, yes, I certainly have. And I think that my friends that are close to him are well aware. So I do numerous media things and they're always asking me, well, if you were king for a day, if you were in charge of the USDA, I call it the U.S. duh, you know, what would you do? And they want you to take specific programs. Well, I'd substitute this for that. I'd substitute this for that. I mean, that's a normal approach. Right, right.

[James Polis]

Reward your friends.

[Joel Salatin]

Right, right, right, exactly. Patronage. And I tell you know what, I'm really boring. I'm really boring. I'm a one string banjo. All right? I've only got one thing, and that's a food Emancipation proclamation.

[James Polis]

Okay, sounds promising.

[Joel Salatin]

Yes, yes. So. And I know these are strong words, you know, the Emancipation Proclamation historically was a big deal, but it freed the slaves. Right now we have an enslaved, shackled food system that is enslaved to a regulatory, a bureaucratic structure that does not allow neighbor to neighbor food transactions without a bureaucrat involved. Go out and try to make a chicken pot pie and sell it to your neighbor. It's illegal, all right? And so. Or try to, you know, butcher a pig. You can butcher your own pig in the backyard. But if a neighbor comes over and says, oh man, I love the way you raise that pig. Could I buy £2 of sausage from you? Illegal. Okay? And so what we have right now nationally is a prohibition, a criminalization of unfettered direct personal contact. If you want to come to my farm, smell around, look around, ask around. And as two, I'm using again, powerful language, voluntary, consenting adults expressing our freedom, freedom of choice. We should be able to engage in a food transaction without a license, without a bureaucrat, without paying off somebody. We just engage in a transaction.

[James Polis]

Right? Well, you know, we live in health and safety world where we're obsessed with health and safety because our obsessions are actually blowing back in our face and making us less healthy and less safe. But that's the argument is, oh no, you know, you might have Farmer Bill might not measure up to the right standards and might not use the best practices. Then he's going to kill you because you're going to try to taste his delicious. Looking past.

[Joel Salatin]

Right. On a cottage industry bill that I was involved with in Virginia, for example. You're exactly right. The Our commissioner of agriculture, the top guy in the state under the governor, cabinet level position, he came up to me during a break in the, in the hearing and he was a very nice guy. And he said, Joel, he said, we can't let people choose their food. If we did, we couldn't build enough hospitals fast enough.

[James Polis]

You're going to kill, grab all the.

[Joel Salatin]

People that are going to get bad food. And of course my first reaction is, well, as if government sanctioned food is all okay. I mean, you can give your kid 4 cans of coca Cola every day, that's perfectly safe. But one teaspoon of raw milk, no, that's deadly. And so the truth is that safety. I'm just going to a blanket statement, this is heresy. But safety is subjective. Safety is subjective. There are people every day that engage in, in my view, very unsafe things. But I mean, I'm not going to go bungee jump. Okay. I can think of other things. I'm not going to go. You know, I think in a lot of ways sending your child to public school is unsafe.

[James Polis]

Right, Right.

[Joel Salatin]

So safety becomes a very subjective thing. And if the government can determine what is safe and what isn't, that is just an express way.

[James Polis]

Right. If I can sign a waiver for going to an escape room, I should be able to sign a waiver for buying and selling neighbors food.

[Joel Salatin]

Yes, absolutely. We actually tried that, we tried to introduce legislation in Virginia for that very thing. A waiver. Why can't somebody come out and if they want to make a voluntary choice and the attorney general said waivers don't mean anything, they don't hold up in court and you can't, whatever, you can't wave away your, your, your, your uninformed consent for something you don't know about.

[James Polis]

Okay, so they're working hard to shut it down.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so here's the thing. If anybody says, well then people might get bad food, the first thing you're assuming is that government approved food is better than food you might find elsewhere.

[James Polis]

Yeah.

[Joel Salatin]

So that's a big thing. The second thing is you're assuming that bureaucrats are more trustworthy than farmers. Well, I think that's a pretty big stretch too, especially if we've seen the machinations of Anthony Fauci Covid and this sort of thing. To think that the bureaucracy is actually purer than the wind driven snow and these farmers are a bunch of dolt. Idiot. You know, conniving, cheating.

[James Polis]

I always go back to like, you know, the, the top games app, games on your phone or whatever. Are like farm simulators. Kids want to simulate running farms. They're not, they're not doing bureaucrat simulators.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Exactly right. And of course, the other side always comes and says, well, we need a fair playing field. I mean, if Tyson has to go through this, you know, licensing and compliance stuff, then, then everybody should have to go through it. And that's like, that's like saying, oh, we're going to level the playing field on football. All right. The only place you can play football is on an NFL approved compliant stadium.

[James Polis]

Sure.

[Joel Salatin]

Sunday, Sunday afternoon pickup games in the backyard. You know, where the goal post is, the lilac bush and the clothesline on one end and the peach tree and the flower pot on the other. No, no, no, no, no. Now that's not going to work. We've got to level the playing field. And we can only play, you know, on an NFL stadium. Well, that's a level of playing field, but it's not appropriate for any kind of freedom or liberty to express itself.

[James Polis]

Well, and it's crazy when you've got, you know, you got people on the left who say, we're for defending our sacred democracy and you got people on the right who know we're for defending the American people. And it's like somehow neither of these two groups can come together in any way and crack the code on this.

[Joel Salatin]

That's right.

[James Polis]

Actually don't seem to have actual trust in ordinary people.

[Joel Salatin]

Right.

[James Polis]

To do things that are actually good for them.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, yeah, we, you know, we have, we love being now called the culture of choice. Right? I mean, choice is everything. We've got. We've got choice in the bathroom now, choice in the bedroom, choice in the womb, but we don't have choice in the kitchen. And people say, well, come on, I go to Walmart, I go to Kroger's or Piggly Wiggly or, you know, HEB in Texas. Look at all the shelves. They're full of choice. But that is a very, very narrow choice. All of that. Pretty labels. I mean, think about the last time you saw a, whatever a hot dog recall or a recall of eggs or something, or a recall of any food item, you know, sausage, whatever. And in the recall, it'll give you the brand names and there's like 25 brand names. You know, it all came from the same fun factories. There's really no choice.

[James Polis]

That's right.

[Joel Salatin]

Try getting, you know, Aunt Matilda's quiche or try getting, you know, Uncle John's homemade summer sausage. There's Very little choice. And so.

[James Polis]

And then everything that's not perishable is just the same ten chemicals and fillers.

[Joel Salatin]

Right, right. So what happens is that. And what has happened since 1906 when we started the Food Safety Inspection Service. I'm starting 1908 took two years after Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle for socialist President Teddy Roosevelt to give in to the demands of the industry. At that time, seven companies controlled 50% of America's meat supply. Seven companies controlled 50% of the American meat supply. And that was considered oligarchical. And when that book came out, within six months, those companies lost half of their market share and people fled back to their neighborhood, butcher, their neighbors and all this.

[James Polis]

They still had neighbors to flee back to.

[Joel Salatin]

Exactly. They sure did. Good point. Because there was still a fairly active. Remember that was only seven companies controlling 50%. So there was still a fairly active, you know, neighborhood community, you know, canneries, slaughterhouses, things like that. Well, the companies, they went to Roosevelt on their knees, said, hey, you've got to protect us here. We're going to go out of business. And so he gave them the Food Safety Inspection Service, the federal, you know, inspection agency. Since that time. Now we've gone now to where today four companies control 85% of the meat mar. Meat trade in America. And we call that a free market. And so that's what the government involvement has done over this period of time. It has centralized and concentrated because it is always, always, always scaled prejudicial.

[James Polis]

How much of the resistance politically to neighbor to neighbor food economies is coming from those big four?

[Joel Salatin]

A lot. A lot. Because they know, see, to the liberal mindset, we've talked about the liberal and the conservative here already. To the liberal mindset, the answer to this oligarchy, and it is an oligarchy, the answer is we've got to send the Federal Trade Commission in there, do antitrust suits. We've got to break up these big companies.

[James Polis]

We got to replace four with one.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, yeah, we've got to break up these big companies. And my response to that is no. How do you break up oligarchical stuff? I don't know who said it first, but somebody said that there is no monopoly in any civilization. There's never a monopoly without government collusion. Because if you truly have a free and open market, there are too many innovative ideas or there's too. There's too much creativity out here to keep another idea from coming to the fore. And so if we actually opened up the market for neighbor to neighbor transactions, there would be, let me tell you, there would be hundreds of thousands of small scale farms, domestic culinary, you know, culinary folks that would start selling to their neighbors, to their, to their friends and neighbors. And it would, and I don't know how big that is, you know, I don't know. But I can tell you that much of the elite pricing of local foods is not because it's inherently more expensive to make local foods. It's because the paperwork requirements, the licensing requirements to legally sell on a small scale are so price prejudicial. I mean we have a, I co own a small federal inspected slaughterhouse for example. It costs US roughly $500 between 4 and $500 to do to a beef, to get beef animal dead and packages of T bone steaks to get it market ready. It takes us $500 to do what the big four do for about $70. And much of that is because we have to have the same paperwork, the same licensing, the same compliance, the same inspector offices, you know, all of the things, the requirements of a big operation and you just can't spread it across as many pounds or widgets. And so the system, the system is very prejudicial against small scale operations both philosophically and economically. And so the big companies who tend to control the Republicans, they don't want the competition and they're going to scream, oh, people are going to get bad food and all this. And the liberals, they don't want a free market because they've never wanted free markets. And they don't trust the Ralph Naderites. The Ralph Naderites can't, you know, can't trust you to make a, they say we can't trust people to make a decision. We can't trust people to make any decisions, health, food, you know, investment, anything.

[James Polis]

Can't trust them to make a sandwich.

[Joel Salatin]

Right, right. And so the one side, the conservative side typically which owns the Republicans, is trying to protect their market, their industry and the liberals are trying to protect the consumer from what they think is consumer stupidity. And so it doesn't get done. But if we had a food emancipation proclamation to unshackle our food system and to free up small scale entrepreneurs to access their neighbors. I don't know how big it is, but the local price would drop, the access would go through the roof. I mean, how many people, Man, I wish I could get something better, but I don't know where it is. It's not very available. Suddenly it would be available all over the place and that would chip away, chip away, I think pretty dramatically. It would chip away at the stranglehold of the concentrated, centralized food system, which showed its fragility in 2020.

[James Polis]

Oh, yeah.

[Joel Salatin]

You know, we have this efficient food system and suddenly there was nothing on the shelves.

[James Polis]

And you had the governor of Michigan saying that you can't buy seeds.

[Joel Salatin]

Right?

[James Polis]

Madness.

[Joel Salatin]

Right. And we had a massive control of our, we had a massive breakdown of our food supply. I mean, does anybody think it's so crazy, it's like a rhetorical question. Does anybody really think that if in the spring of 2020, instead of having, I don't know, 3,000 mega processing facilities, you know, funnels, if you will, that funneled all of our meat and vegetables and everything, you know, into the American home and industry. If Instead of having 3,000 mega processing facilities, if instead we had had 300,000 small scale neighborhood abattoirs, canneries, processing facilities, would we have had as big a hiccup?

[James Polis]

Right. Of course not.

[Joel Salatin]

Of course not.

[James Polis]

That's redundancy. Everyone knows you built that into the system. If you want resilience, of course.

[Joel Salatin]

And so when you democratize and you broaden that base, that market base, you build in all sorts of, of protections for safety, for security, for stability in that marketplace. It's a multi legged stool instead of a two legged stool. That's the idea.

[James Polis]

Okay, so Emancipation Proclamation number one, Abraham Lincoln just wrote it down, they sent it out over the telegraph and voila. Is that all you need for your version for food? Is it enough to just get to Daddy Trump and to say, you know, it's going to be one sentence, all you have to do is sign it? Is that enough?

[Joel Salatin]

Yes. I'm not an attorney and I don't know what all the legalities are, but, but if you look at his executive orders and some of the things that he's done, surely freeing up the food system from the bondage of Tyson is, is no bigger than some of the other things that he's done? And, and you know what, James? I can't imagine something that sounds more Trumpian. I mean, doesn't it sound, can't you imagine them getting up here today? We're going to free our food system. I mean, wouldn't that be something that would just resonate with everybody? And you're going to be able to get food from your neighbors, it's going to be a lot cheaper. And your rural neighbors are going to earn money because they can sell into the community. And we're going to reverse the, the rural to urban investment drain. We're going to move Money from the urban to the rural sector, and these farmers are going to keep some of it. And we're going to unleash. We're going to unleash the rural entrepreneurial spirit on America's foodscape. I mean, there are just so many great little sound bites. I really believe. I really believe that if I could get 30 minutes with Trump to pitch this, I think he'd be all over it.

[James Polis]

I think so, too. There's another piece here, too, and I want to talk about the whole tariffs thing, because this comes. This is all brought to bear on the same sort of issue. Yeah, there is. There is this concern that, you know, Americans don't want to work in the sweatshops. They don't want to do the sort of manual labor jobs. They want to outsource all that stuff to Vietnam. And they might complain about globalization and they might complain about cheap goods from Amazon, but at the end of the day, they'd rather have that and complain about it than go do the backbreaking work, hunch over the, you know, the. The sewing machine gutted out at the mill every day, and that's kind of the end of that conversation. But if you open up and revitalize this whole sort of decentralized agricultural sector that gives people all kinds of stuff to do that's, you know, challenging work, but rewarding work and physical work, that has an emotional component and a spiritual component that we can talk about and a community component.

[Joel Salatin]

Yes.

[James Polis]

And people don't need to be sitting in the sweatshops all day, whether they're in Vietnam or whether they're in Oklahoma.

[Joel Salatin]

Oh, so well said. I mean, one of the reasons. One of the reasons that stuff has moved out of our country from food to manufacturing, you know, making towels and T shirts, it's not just because of the cheap labor. It's because we have regulatorily and inordinately increased our labor costs so high that we can't compete anymore. And, you know, we have. Americans love to work. I mean, we're a working society. I mean, Yankee ingenuity, right? I mean, that's in our DNA. We're. We're workers.

[James Polis]

Restless, restless people. Even if you stick a phone in their hand all day, they're still trying to figure out what to do.

[Joel Salatin]

We are workers, as opposed to, say, Europe. You know, I mean, we're not looking for time off. We are workers. But when you hamstring us with workman's comp, with minimum wage and trust. I'm not interested in sweatshops. I'm not interested in abusing people. But one of the problems is, let's take our farm for example. People say, well, good night. If you're not buying chemical fertilizer, if you're not buying pesticides and you don't have a vet bill because your animals are healthy and all this, why can't you sell stuff way cheaper than it is in a marketplace? Well, the reason is because we substitute equipment, equipment intensity, energy intensity, capital intensity, which is of course banks and money, borrowed money and pharmaceutical intensity. We substitute all that with people. And the IRS doesn't like you to have people.

[James Polis]

Oh no.

[Joel Salatin]

You can go out and abuse your tractor and depreciate it quickly and buy a new one and expense it off. You can expense off equipment, you can expense off fertilizer, you can expense off all of these inputs, but you can't expense off people. The government will come in and well, you've got to have this, this. And again, I'm not interested. We pay our people very well. Our team is, we have a fantastic team. We're all in this. But this is why industry is being pushed so far to go to robots. They want to do everything to get away from people because. And anybody that thinks I'm blowing smoke. Own your own business and go through a workman's comp audit one time, go through an OSHA audit one time and you will find out very quickly that the requirements and the regulations around people make every business want to have as few of them as possible. We believe on our farm that we have a much better land management program, a much better creation stewardship program and a much better just ecology program. If we have more people, better, more what we call ice to acre ratio. Increase the ice to acre. You know, when Michael Pollan was writing Omnivore's Dilemma, he talked about if all those concentrated animal feeding operations at Smithfield and Tyson, if they had glass walls, it would fundamentally change the way Americans ate because people would see it. But no, what did they do? They have them in buildings, they put up razor wire around and you got to look, if you've got to walk through sheep dip and put on a hazardous material suit to go visit your food, you might not want to eat it, you know. So our farm has an Open Door Policy 24, 7, 365. Anyone can come at any time from anywhere in the world to see anything, anywhere, anytime, unannounced. That's our commitment to transparency. And by substituting management for all of these chemical energy, pharmaceuticals, crutches or inputs, we Actually don't save money, but we do fundamentally change the kind of jobs people have. For example, on our farm, we process a lot of chickens, but we have a policy that we don't process more than about three or four hours in a day, only a couple days a week. And the other time you're out feeding chickens, you're growing. Just the very idea that somebody kills things or peels onions every day, it makes it into drudgery. But if you have small, entrepreneurial, diversified operations where you have different animals and different things and different plants, then you have a workforce that becomes much more interesting. Today I'm doing cows, Tomorrow I'm moving chickens. Next day I'm butchering things. The next day I'm peeling potatoes. You know, you move around now. You don't have carpal tunnel syndrome. You've got interest, you've got broad, eclectic understanding. And so there are all sorts of major societal and social things that happen when you broaden the base of what I'm talking about, rather than just, you know, I mean, the average chicken processing outfit in Virginia. I know, I've heard them say, the thousands of people they have on those chicken lines, every single procedure can be taught in 20 minutes. Now, you think from a human standpoint, a human affirmation standpoint, if you spent your life doing something that you could learn in 20 minutes, how human affirming is that. And then as soon as you go to compost, rather than chemical fertilizers, for example, we do hundreds and hundreds of tons of compost. Now suddenly, instead of spending seven or eight billion dollars a year fighting fires around the US that are created because the environmental wackos have shut down the chainsaws and we can't cut a dead tree. Let's take those trees, chip them, and let's take all that biomass and convert it into compost. Now we don't have to buy a single pound of chemical fertilizer. And we have created thousands and thousands of jobs where dad and mom can come home. And little Jenny asks, well, what did you do today, Daddy? And he says, oh, man, I weeded the forest. I took down all that dead. And Joe biomass made it so it could decompose better, so that Farmer John can grow hay and grass and food and potatoes, and it feeds the earthworms so that we build soil. And you inherit a world that has richer soil and more earthworms than I did.

[James Polis]

And no student loan debt.

[Joel Salatin]

And no student loan debt. And all of those people are affirmed in a sacred, noble task.

[James Polis]

Okay, so you Said the S word sacred. We got about seven minutes left, so I want to make sure, you know, tell us just like, how does the Christian piece fit in for you? And I know there are some people who are like, well, not everyone's Christian. It's like, well, you might learn something. So what do you got?

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah. So for me, the number one thing is ultimately it's not mine. You don't have to be a Christian to realize it was here before we came. I mean that. Yeah, the courthouse says I own it, but I don't really own it. Yeah, I don't own the water, I don't own the trees. I don't own.

[James Polis]

Not taking it with you.

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, not taking it with me. And so in my Christian theology, that owner is God. And so if it's his stuff, then I ultimately, I'm a steward. I'm a. I don't own it. I'm a caretaker of something that's his. And I would suggest that if I was God and I made it and I looked down and goodness. There's a dead zone the size of Rhode island in the Gulf of Mexico. All the shrimp and the crabs I put there, they're all dead. They're gone. It won't even grow anything. And I look around, whoa. I've got three legged salamanders, I made those with four. And I've got. Got infertile frogs, you know, that can't get around because of poisoning. And oh, my eagle eggs, the beautiful eagle, they won't hatch because of ddt. I'd say somebody kind of messed up my stuff. That is not the return on investment I was looking for. And so that shapes that dramatically shapes how we handle our ecology. It shapes what we grow. Because then our patrons, we don't call them customers, we call them our patron saints. Okay? Our patrons that support us, we're now responsible for them. We don't want them to get foodborne bacterial diarrhea. We don't want them to be sick. We want them to flourish and be vibrant and have great immune systems and not toxicity. And so that frames it from the, from the earthworm to the plate. It frames how we steward and care for what God has entrusted to us to care for.

[James Polis]

Yeah. All right. I mean, it just seems like so many people are on this page in America and they don't really know what to do about it or how they can best intervene. So, like, what, you know, what is your, what is your generic advice? You're an American. You see what's going on. You know that Millions of people agree with you, you know, that time is in some sense running short. You see what kind of world we're handing off to our children. It's a poorer world, it's a sicker world, it's a more unstable world. What do you do?

[Joel Salatin]

Three things. Three things. Number one, get in your kitchen. We cannot have an authentic food system and be this profoundly abdicating our visceral knowledge and participation in our food system. Get single ingredient stuff. It's never been easier to cook from scratch. We got insta pots, we've got crock pots, we've got time bake, we've got slicers, dicers, blenders, juicers. You know, it's never been easier to take single ingredient stuff. You know, yes, a butternut squash, yes a beet, okay? Not, you know, frozen pizza and the processed stuff. So get in your kitchen and get excited about participating in domestic culinary arts with your techno glitzy kitchen gadgets. Right?

[James Polis]

This isn't anti tech stuff. It's like, what are you supplementing and.

[Joel Salatin]

What are you trying to replace? That's right. Never been injured. That's number one. Number two, do something yourself. Touch the mystery and majesty of life. I don't care whether it's mung bean sprouts in a quart jar on the windowsill, a 12 inch by 12 inch vermicomposting bin under your kitchen sink. Touch something life. Touch life something and just appreciate the miracle of life, the biology. And number three, put attention. Invest in your provenance. The biggest lie is that I don't have to change. If those people would do the right thing and if those people would do the right thing. And if those people, all those jerks over there, you know, well, we live in a time where we want to defund things. Well, it's time to defund the stuff that's bad and let's fund the stuff that's good. And so put some attention on finding your providence. Whether it's your farmer's market, your local farmer, your local roadside stand, a website, you know, with a good farm that doesn't use chemicals, whatever that is. I mean, shameless plug, we ship nationwide. Glad to help people, but. But the fact is, get in your kitchen, touch the mystery and majesty of life viscerally somehow and then invest in sleuthing, your providence. Those are the three things that anybody can do.

[James Polis]

All right, and you guys are Poly Face Farms, right? Is there a little story behind the name?

[Joel Salatin]

Yeah, the farm of many faces. Poly being many, the Latin prefix for many. So we're a Many Face farms, many enterprises, many faces, many people. The many facets. It's the Many Faced Farm.

[James Polis]

Great. Joel Salaton. Let's emancipate the food. Let's emancipate the farmers. Let's go.

[Joel Salatin]

Thank you.

[James Polis]

All right. Thanks for joining us. That's all the time we got. Until next time around. I'm James Polis. This is Zero Hour, and may God.

[Joel Salatin]

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[James Polis]

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[Joel Salatin]

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